


sharp teeth

by simplyprologue



Category: The Newsroom (US TV), The West Wing
Genre: And Vibes, Do Not Look For a Plot Here I Am Just Processing Trauma, Gen, Mac and Toby Talk About the Attempted Coup, No Plot Just PTSD, Sloan Sabbith - Freeform, You Can't Tell Me They Wouldn't Be Friends, background MacKenzie McHale/Will McAvoy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-30
Updated: 2021-01-30
Packaged: 2021-03-16 01:02:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,037
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29073765
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/simplyprologue/pseuds/simplyprologue
Summary: She’s considering if it’s feasible to drink another cup of coffee without seeing colors usually only perceived by deep sea shrimp and certain species of bees when the text notification pops up on her phone.I’m downstairs in the park. Will trade one (1) bitch session for a cup of coffee.Mac takes it as a sign, double checks what time it is, and slips into her coat before heading into the elevator.
Comments: 13
Kudos: 35





	sharp teeth

**Author's Note:**

> I drink from the keg of glory. Shout-out to Pippa and Leah, for seeing me through. Hoping everyone who reads this is doing okay. It's been a really weird January.

_There are two things that make_ _  
_ _the conscious world move,_ _  
_ _decision and desire_

Sharp Teeth, Toby Barlow

\---

Friday, January 8, 2021  
2:45 PM

\---

She’s considering if it’s feasible to drink another cup of coffee without seeing colors usually only perceived by deep sea shrimp and certain species of bees when the text notification pops up on her phone. _I’m downstairs in the park. Will trade one (1) bitch session for a cup of coffee._ Mac takes it as a sign, double checks what time it is, and slips into her coat before heading into the elevator. 

Very much envying Rachel Maddow with her Connecticut compound and her live-in producer, she feels her eyes water with exhaustion as a cold wind blows across her face despite her medical grade mask. 

She sees Toby almost immediately, huddled in his jacket and a sloppily hand-knitted hat sitting at one of the cast iron tables and chairs. In front of him are two paper cups of coffee, made just the way she liked it in university -- nearly curdling with cream, and too much sugar. 

It’s cold and Bryant Park is almost empty; she sits at the table over from him, takes off her mask, and stuffs it into her pocket. 

Kindly allowing her to take two sips before launching into blistering dialogue, he observes her warily, which Mac knows to take for concern. She’s known Toby for almost thirty years now, and while the backstory of their friendship is often hand waved into vagaries, he will always a little bit think of her as the girl who, while in New York City for the summer while her father worked at the UN, decided it would be fun to stumble into the Brooklyn Heights office of a City Council candidate and volunteer every day between May and September. 

It was not a close election, but she did keep showing up every summer after that to work on whatever campaign he was steering towards defeat until graduation. 

Mac is no longer a girl of eighteen, the same age that his own daughter will be soon, but Toby is old enough to allow her two sips in peace. 

But just two. 

“I saw this coming. I saw this coming the entire Santos Administration. And do you know what people said to me? Do you know?” 

Considering that they have not actually spoken real human words between them in at least six months, she does not.

“No,” she says, taking the top off her cup and blowing steam off the surface of coffee hot enough to give her tongue second degree burns. 

“They said to me, directly into my face,” he gesticulates, as he always has, wildly, “that _that’s not America, Toby._ They told me, a proud Jewish man from _Brooklyn,_ that America has never had a -- a fascism problem. A racism problem. A xenophobia problem. An anti-semitism, an anti-woman _problem._ I saw it coming. But even Josh--”

“Josh told you--?” Mac’s brows furrow. 

“He’s from Connecticut, MacKenzie.” He waves the thought away with his hand, before scrubbing it over his face, trains of thought rapidly changing track. “Arnie Vinnick is rolling in his grave.”

This gives her a slight pause. Licking her lips carefully, she says, “Arnie Vinnick isn’t dead.”

“He’s dead to me, for not running again in 2016.”(1)

Nodding sharply, she closes her eyes, and wonders not for the first time if the reason that Toby and Will have never gotten along is because they’re too similar to interact peaceably. “Well, I’ll tell the boys in the production booth to slip that onto the chyron and see how it goes. Maybe Arnie will finally call me back with a comment.” 

“Good! Bury the entire Republican party for all I care! You can’t appease them, shouldn’t reconcile with them, might as well bury the whole party.” Toby half-considers making a joke about throwing them in with the mass graves that continue to be carved into the outskirts of America’s major metropolitan areas, but decides at the last moment that it isn’t funny. Not after the year they’ve all had. “Except Will. No, not except Will. Fuck your husband!”

“As often as the good Lord lets me, but I’ll remind you he very publically became a Democrat earlier this year.” Her wry smile is a mask for weariness.

“How’s that going for him?” Toby asks. 

“See those two gentleman watching us as they try to casually stand by a trash can?” Flipping her hair back over her shoulder, she nods at the two young men she has trouble not referring to as _Lonny 2_ and _Lonny Jr._

“Yeah?” he asks, craning his neck.

“Those are my bodyguards. We’ve received enough death threats to wallpaper my office. AWM’s insurance company won’t let us leave our home without them.” As has always been the case, MacKenzie is more flippant about her personal safety than those of others. A lasting side-effect, she supposes, of being shot at and having all the bullets miss. Of being stabbed, a walking away fairly clean. 

“Why didn’t you tell me! Let’s go inside.” 

Toby has not had the same experience, his brain immediately sloshing full of images of his old and dear friend slumping where she sits, satin blouse staining red. 

Taking a large sip of coffee, she waves him off. “I know you still feel personally responsible for getting Bartlet shot, but I figure all the ones who would actually shoot me have been deemed a flight risk and haven’t actually been able to go anywhere.” 

Besides, she’s too important now to be anywhere dangerous. It feels disingenuous to claim an anxiety that she surrendered to younger and brighter lights than her over a decade ago. If someone wants to shoot her? Go ahead. She’s ten minutes from the best emergency department in the country and has more money than she knows what to do with. 

_Aren’t you worried what would happen to your children?_ Reese asked her, as if men ever get asked that question. 

No one fussed over Will when he decided to put himself in the jaws of the sharp-toothed monster that is born and bred American-grade fascism. 

She knows what happened to the reporters in the chambers on Wednesday afternoon. She knows what it feels like, to have the hands of angry men on your arms and legs. Angry, entitled men. No, she thinks. She’s perfectly safe here, as if the phrase _stay safe_ has ever meant anything more than a platitude coming from a man. 

“How far is it from DC to New York?” he asks. 

Rolling her eyes, she defers. “Bold of you to assume I know--” 

“Trains, Mac! Trains! They can take a train!”

“Now you just sound like Will. Stop yelling, I’m not supposed to draw attention to myself,” she shushes him. “Who is conveniently on the air right now, so that I can slip outside to meet with you.” Toby’s eyes attempt to escape his head. She clicks her teeth together, annoyed. “What? Excuse me if I’m not confident in the aim of an overhyped alt-right LARPer.”

“You… scare me, at times,” he replies, settling back into his seat and crossing his arms. “Who taught you what LARP means?”

“One of the Millenials I’ve hand raised in complete seclusion to do the news.” By which she means Jim. She usually means Jim, who is less cool than Maggie and Tess and Tamara, and tries to make her watch _Battlestar Galactica_ at least once a year but still can’t beat Kendra at chess. “And what do you mean? I’ve always been this way.”

“That’s why it scares me. I’ve never met another woman who faces one conflict head on by fleeing into another bigger, more active conflict like you do.” 

“I’ve found it’s better for your skin than going to prison,” she scoffs. 

Mac realizes, of course, that it’s not just that Toby and her husband are too similar. When _Will and MacKenzie 1.0_ imploded during the summer of 2007 there were very few people she could muster up the courage to explain what happened, why she needed to leave DC in such a hurry.

“How would you know?” 

Toby, a recently pardoned felon, professional long-suffering ex-husband, and a man in possession of a decently comfortable couch in his apartment, was one such person.On occasion, he likes to bring up that aforementioned couch still has snot stains leftover from a not-so-silent sob session. 

“How would _you_ know? You got to be under house arrest in your apartment in Woodley Park.” If her brain had acoustics, Toby thinks he might be able to hear the spark of a light bulb going off behind her eyes. “Speaking of--”

“Where could this possibly go?”

“How is President Bartlet? He called Will on Wednesday, to let him know that Zoey and Charlie Young were safe.” 

It’s this type of bait-and-switch questioning that, on occasion, feeds into Toby’s secret theory that Mac was sent to the Middle East as a CIA operative by Santos. 

He doesn’t say this out loud. 

But he has his suspicions. She makes a little too much sense for a woman who is the niece of the dearly departed Lord John Marbury.(2) 

“Stir crazy. He refuses to learn how video calling works, and his grandchildren haven’t been able to visit so he’s lost his captive audience,” he answers smoothly. While his relationship with Bartlet never quite recovered, he’s still in the know. The loss of Leo shook something loose in all of them, and Jed was unable to allow estranged to become stranger. “Sam was stuck on a call with him for over three hours the other week when he called to ask a question about dairy farmers. I think he’s ready to put Nyquil in Abbey’s wine and make a run for it. The Secret Service will take him down like a calf at the rodeo before he gets very far, but the way he tells it he hasn’t seen the sun in nine months and his wheelchair has been chained to the fireplace.” 

Tilting her head, Mac considers the odds of a disabled octogenarian being able to make a prison break without aid. “If I was him, I’d be more concerned about the fact that I hadn’t driven a car since the late nineties. Does he know what highways are like now? Does he even know how to work a GPS?” 

“I think at this point he’d overcome it to get to spend thirty seconds with the public,” he answers sagely, and then leans in deftly to a tonal shift. “I haven’t spoken to him about it yet. But I’d imagine that the thought of his daughter and son-in-law being shot at _again_ by white supremacists inside their place of work inspired Abbey to make quick work of a sedative. I’m shocked he was up to calling Will.”

Playing with her hair, Mac nods. 

“Fair enough.” 

She keeps nodding for a little too long, her body echoing the motion until it dwindles to nothing. Toby’s felt the way she looks; a pang of sympathy too keen for his liking rings in his belly. 

“I say this with all the love and care in the world… that I am capable of,” he prefaces. Mac’s eyes crinkle with fondness, and she drops her head into her hands. “When was the last time you slept?”

Her first attempt at replying is a low, drawn-out cackle. _I’m too old for this_ , she wants to say, except that Charlie kept pace with all of them, until, well, the day he dropped dead. Regardless, Will still has a decade on her, and Toby even more years on him. She _feels_ too old for this, feels too old to have learned about the SALT talks at her father’s knee a lifetime ago. 

None of them are young anymore, and there is no _time_ to even think about the laying down of burdens, for who would pick them up but their own children?

 _Her_ children, who are all of the age when Toby’s father was indicted for murder. When Will’s father was indicted for domestic battery. A second charge, a third. Her own father, the indomitable Cold Warrior, crossing the world into beautifully decorated rooms and shadowy corners alike, trading the lives of poorer men and women to sell the idea of a greater good. These sharp-toothed men who raised them to speak the language of violence, done by the state and armies and mobs and angry, livid men. 

All of them, now dead. 

“I woke up drooling on my desk sometime around four in the morning?” is how she answers him. There have been times in their lives when they’ve both slept more. Times in their lives when they’ve both slept markedly less. “I’m not going to sleep until… well, it’s never going to be over. Probably when Congress goes home for the weekend, I’ll hand it over to the VP of Weekend Programming, then monitor remotely from my office at home. We have a makeshift studio in the basement if Will needs to hop back on.”

“Democrats are whipping up impeachment votes on both sides of the aisle,” Toby answers, his tone conveying an air of _good luck with that,_ “and unless Trump gets suspended from Twitter again,(3) I doubt anyone in the caucus is actually going home to _rest_ this weekend.” 

She blinks across the tables at him. “Can I get you on record about that?”

“No, of course not. They’re trying to be covert about it.”

“Whip counts aren’t covert.” 

He scoffs. “Twitter is reaching something like fifty tweets a second telling the Speaker she isn’t moving fast enough. It’s pretty covert.” 

A conclusion that could only be so easily made by someone who spent eight years in the national pressure cooker called the White House, Mac thinks. DC, where everyone assumes the average citizen has received any civics education. 

“Twitter doesn’t know that a week is light speed for policy wonks,” she counters. She’s not sure who she has less patience for at this point, Twitter or policy wonks. “Ten years ago, the country was as divided as it was during the Civil War. In ten years, it’s only gotten worse. Republicans find new ways to blame it on Black people. Or latinos. Or the LGBTQ community. The civil religion of America has been revealed to be authoritarianism costumed as a star-spangled Jesus Christ. Twas ever thus.” 

They’re quiet, then. The city around them, less so. Even as COVID-19 diagnoses soar, the city refuses to yield. Cars snake around the perimeter of Bryant Park, horns blaring. People, masked and scarved and jacketed move past each other at breakneck speed, disappearing down into subway stations and fast-casual restaurants. Only the New York Public Library stands silent and still, laminated signs taped to the inside of the front doors, a chain pulled across the front steps. 

Spreading his hands out over the iron grated table, Toby clears his throat. “When Bartlet and Josh were shot, I thought we would be able to solve it.” 

“Yeah?” 

_How?_ she wants to ask. It seems impossible, but so did reuniting Germany, before the Berlin Wall came down. _How?_ But that isn’t what Toby is trying to tell her. 

“I wanted to sue the KKK.” 

And what a thing that would have been, to see the United States Department of Justice take down the Knights of the Klu Klux Klan in federal court. 

“What stopped you?”

“We thought there was human decency left in the world. We thought it was just an aberration. That we could out-legislate online hate groups. We didn’t know what was coming for us.” 

Ten years ago, the Tea Party was the American Taliban. Now it’s the entire Republican Party, aiding and abetting and inciting insurgents to sack the Capitol Building. Toby ruminates on Bartlet’s words to him, in the aftermath of the original calamity. _Break’s over._ This happened, and now people like him and Josh and Charlie and Zoey and Will and Mac and her band of merry men have to rejoin the fight. There’s no time to rest, no time to sort through impacts and meditate on false statements of unity. 

_Break’s over._

“How’s… Margaret, is her name? The name of your reporter who was in the Capitol?” 

Mac’s face shutters. “Maggie Jordan. She’s a professional. She’s seen worse. She’s back at it.”

Nodding curtly, he asks, “How is Maggie, really?”

The light behind Mac’s eyes shorts out. 

“Two men in surplus tactical gear tried to zip tie her hands and feet and drag her off to God-knows-where to do who-knows-what to her.(4) Capitol Police completely abandoned her. Her associate producer had to clobber them over the head with a camera so she could get them off.” And nobody did anything. The doors were left unlocked for them. Barricades laid down. “I want to kick anyone who says that this isn’t America in the teeth.” 

“We were so, so wrong.” He shakes his head, the bobble on top of his hat swaying precariously. 

“We’re supposed to be in DC for the Inauguration.” A sigh escapes her body, deflating her. “Everything in my body is telling me that he’s going to incite another attack. But hey, that might be the PTSD from the last time I was up close and personal with a mob.” 

“Well, look on the bright side. You might have to go down for an impeachment trial, too.” He snorts, shaking his head. “We’re not as young as we used to be.”

“We? Toby, you were twenty when I was born.” 

In a facsimile of self-consciousness, she pats at the roots of her hair, where the greys have begun to make themselves dominant in the months since she’s been able to get them touched up. Under Toby’s knitted cap, she knows that his hair has turned snow white to match the silver threading his beard. 

He looks aghast. “Sometimes I forget that you were an infant when I first hired you.” 

“When the world was as big as a New York City Council race.”

“There’s no nine train now.”

And there hasn’t been for a long time. 

The mention of children reminds her of her own bright-faced hellions, and then, “God, Toby, where are Molly and Huck? They weren’t--” 

“Andy put them on an Amtrak express to me last weekend. They’re isolating in the apartment until their test results come back. She was worried something like this was going to happen.” He pauses. “Molly made me a hat.” 

Mac eyes it. It’s not half bad. 

“How is she?”

“Molly?”

“Andy,” she clarifies.

“Unflappable. Donna hauled her out. I think her feet may have touched the ground once or twice.” Was he absolutely on the verge of vomiting on his shoes until he got the text message from Josh that they were both safe? Absolutely. The important thing is that he didn’t, and Molly and Huck didn’t have to watch their mother’s execution live on Twitch. “I’m just glad Josh wasn’t there. He runs towards the things he should be running away from. Like gunshots. You and him have that in common. Do you mind if I? I haven’t been able to with the twins here.”

He slides a pack of cigarettes out of his coat, followed by a lighter, raising them with a little shake that seems to be the universal code for _do you want one?_

“Go for it. I half wish I could. The smell makes Josie sick, besides the fact that Will would make me eat crow. If there was a week to take smoking back up…” 

Toby’s eyes widen, head listing slightly in agreement and bemusement. “When was the last time your kids saw either of their parents?”

“Besides their father on the TV screen?”

“That doesn’t count.” He puts a cigarette between his lips, and with a _snick_ of his lighter, the end begins to smolder. 

“We finagled breakfast before we headed in on Wednesday morning. We read the intelligence reports and, well, I guessed. Will’s niece -- I mean, you know Liv. She’s in your class. Liv and her girlfriend have been staying with us since March, when Columbia shut down the first time and no one could get a flight out of the city. They’ve been switching off with our nanny.” She is acutely aware, as someone raised by a nanny herself, how privileged she sounds. How privileged she is. “I didn’t think we would be raising our children to fight the Confederacy.” 

They have enough wealth that if she let them, her children could just be moneyed and ignorant, if she stopped retching long enough to allow it. 

“Slavery is America’s original sin.” Christian doctrine from the most Jewish man MacKenzie knows. Like much dogma purveyed by the modern American Church, it has very little textual or historical basis in the actual Bible. She suspects he knows that. Toby laughs at himself, and at her, but just a little, taking another puff off his smoke. “Of course our children will be fighting the Confederacy. So will their children. It’s a joke that we didn’t think that we had to.”

She knows this one. 

“Sometimes the punishment is that you can’t put everything back together again.” 

“Yeah.”

And where does that leave them, two people who have spent their entire adult lives trying to hold it all together with sheer white-knuckled force of will? 

It’s not something that will be fixed today. 

For a number of reasons. 

One of which is Sloan, bundled into her warmest coat, walking towards them. Mac checks her phone and sees a series of missed texts and calls from multiple members of her staff. Politely, Toby tamps out his cigarette on the bottom of his boot. 

_What now?_

“Mac -- hey, Professor Zeigler,” she says by way of greeting, once she realizes who Mac is speaking with. “Jenna said you went outside. Will’s about to get a few more death threats called in, if you want to come back and watch.” 

This is what’s now, Mac realizes. Good people continue to open their mouths and speak the truth. Speak _for_ the truth. Speak for whatever they’re ready to fight for. And then actually do the fighting. It doesn’t matter what comes next -- she’s going to continue waking up every day, and fight for truth. She knows that you can’t put it back in the box -- oh _god_ does she know that, after those six long years of atonement and penance to culminate in a marriage she still doesn’t quite understand, with a husband and children she’ll never feel like she deserves. 

She thanks the fickle universe every day. 

Standing, she pockets her cell phone again. “You wanna come, Toby? We can put you on for a quick five.”

“Nah, I gotta head back uptown and get home to the kids. If I leave them for too long, they go viral on TikTok(5) and I need that to happen solely on Andy’s time.”

“I did not understand that statement.”

Sloan cackles. 

“Give Charlotte a few more years,” Toby says, before dragging himself to his feet and finishing off the last of his coffee. “Then you’ll be in for it, if Gen Z is anything to go by.” 

“I hope so.” Someone’s going to have to give her hell like she and Will gave Charlie. It might as well be their own daughter. Turning to leave, she remembers a news alert that was brought to her attention the summer before, during the height of the Black Lives Matter protests. “Next time you get arrested at a protest with your young scholars, remember you can call Will. There’s nothing he loves more than to argue with the NYPD.” 

A creaky smile pulls at his cheeks. “I’ll remember that. See you around, Mac.” 

She and Sloan watch him chuck the paper cup in the trash, throw a small wave over his shoulder, and walk in the direction of Times Square to catch the C train. Winter wind blowing her bangs into her face, Mac looks at Sloan.

“Okay, who is Will about to sock this time?” 

_Break’s over._

**Author's Note:**

> (1) No, I do not know how to make the timeline make sense but also, I refuse to. Let’s all have fun and process a little trauma.  
> (2) It felt right, so I did it. This is actually the second time I’ve done it, starting with the OG West Wing/Newsroom crossover I did, for ourselves and our posterity which I guess is technically more of an AU.  
> (3) I started writing this like two days after the attempted coup, and my my my how the turn tables.  
> (4) This is a reference to that poor New York Times reporter who was rescued by two other reporters during the siege.  
> (5) Will someone please help Claudia Conway?
> 
> Thanks for coming on this little journey with me. You can find me on twitter @emilyadama.


End file.
